What Causes A Rainbow

Relay for Life raises funds to fight cancer

Local residents teamed up with the American Cancer Society this weekend to fight cancer through the annual Relay for Life fundraiser — held at several locations across central Illinois over the weekend.

This year, 34 teams participated in the Relay for Life event held at Mineral Springs Park in Pekin. The money raised this year will be used to achieve three goals: fund research to identify causes and cures of cancer; provide services to cancer patients in Pekin and Tazewell County; and to educate the public on the prevention and early detection of cancer. The theme for this year’s event was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

 “We have the theme ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ because we believe that there are cures at the end of the rainbow and we want to reach that place,” said Pekin’s Relay for Life event chairperson, Crystal Millett of Creve Coeur.

This was Millett’s first time as chairperson, but not her first time volunteering for Relay for Life. She had served on the planning committee for the five years prior, and plans to again serve as chairperson for the event next year.

    One of the teams represented at this year’s Relay was called “Mrs. S’s Fighters for Life.” Mrs. S is Lisa Schmidgall, who was a sixth-grade teacher at Wilson Intermediate School in Pekin until she was diagnosed with stage four non-small cell lung cancer with metastasis at the beginning of the year.

The mother of two was never a smoker, and she didn’t grow up around second-hand smoke. In Schmidgall’s honor, 25 people — mostly her former students — formed a team to bring awareness to the community. Team members Dakota Richmond, Adyson Aden and Jared Donald all said they wanted to help in any way they could. They raised a little over $1,000 dollars, they said.

    During the opening ceremony, Schmidgall, the 2011 Honorary Survivor, spoke to the gathered crowd.

 “I am a survivor,” she announced proudly.

Schmidgall also thanked family, friends and co-workers for all their support while she and her husband, Chad, tried to keep things as normal as possible for their two young children. Schmidgall said, “We try to find everyday inspiration. We try to live every day to the fullest. None of us can do this alone.”

    Also honored at the opening ceremony was Taylor Owens, who just finished first grade at Jefferson Primary School in Pekin. Owens, too, is a survivor.

HowStuffWorks "What causes a rainbow?"

Two days ago, the question of the day was " Why is the sky blue? " For some reason, that triggered a flood of "What causes a rainbow?" questions, so let's walk through the nature of rainbows.

You know that light is made up of a collection of many colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. That is why a prism can take in white light on one side and produce its own mini-rainbow on the other side. To understand rainbows, you have to start by understanding what is happening inside a prism to let it separate white light into its colors.

A prism is a triangular piece of glass or plastic. To get it to produce a mini-rainbow, you allow a narrow strip of white light to fall on one face of the triangle, like this:

(See this page for a neat java applet that demonstrates the dispersion of a prism.)

The dispersion of colors in a prism occurs because of something called the refractive index of the glass. Every material has a different refractive index. When light enters a material (for example, when light traveling through the air enters the glass of a prism), the difference in the refractive index of air and glass causes the light to bend. The angle of bending is different for different wavelengths of light. As the white light moves through the two faces of the prism, the different colors bend different amounts and in doing so spread out into a rainbow.

In a rainbow , raindrops in the air act as tiny prisms. Light enters the raindrop , reflects off of the side of the drop and exits.

The rainbow bridge, rainbows in art, myth, and science

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